Last week I went to the PC Show here in Singapore and got myself an Acer Aspire One netbook. Honestly amongst all the brands of netbooks I was just looking for the cheapest I could find. Why? Because the specs are almost identical, and so long as it doesn’t look too ugly I’ll take it.
But as I’m using it for a week I’m beginning to fall deeply in love with it. Three factors contributed to my affection – lightness, portability, and connectivity. I could take this baby anywhere without breaking my back. The battery life is decent and the processor is snappy. Plus, with my USB HSDPA modem, and just recently with iPhone tethering, i’m able to surf the web from just about anywhere!
I now have 2 Macs, 2 PCs- an old MacBook Pro and an iMac, my Dell laptop for work, and now little baby Tesla. Lol. I named her. Don’t ask me why I need so many machines, they each serve a purpose.
Now I truly believe that a non-mac machine can make me happy – when that thing is a netbook.
Let’s face it – although engaging yourself in Social Media can be fun and entertaining, it’s bloody hard work, tedious, and time consuming. If you are serious about promoting your brand using Social Media, why not hire a Social Media Intern?
In fact, many companies, especially startups, have jumped on the bandwagon to hire Social Media Interns to do the grunt work for them. Check out SocialMediaJobs.com, an online job searching site tailored specifically for people who seek employment in the Social Media space. A browse through the site would start to give you a rough idea on what this Social Media Intern (let’s just call her SMI) will do.
Your first step to free yourself from the chains of social media overkill is to first identify what exactly you want to use social media for i.e. your goals. Are you looking to create awareness of your brand? Do you want to launch a new product and create buzz around it? After identifying your goals you can start creating a strategy around it.
Your strategy should take into consideration which social networks to use based on your target demographic, and preferrably your SMI is familiar with all of them. You should also mark out in minute detail the frequency of tweeting, blogging, or broadcasting. Plan ahead and prepare for contingencies. Hold a status meeting each morning (no more than half an hour) with your SMI to review the previous day’s action plan, as well as the current day’s tasks.
Piece of advice – get a Social Media Intern that is in touch with social media, networks, all things Internet, and already using all of them. You will save valuable time on training.
Good luck in finding your own Social Media Intern.
One of the important components of being a web socialite is the ability to throw out URLs like business cards. You might have seen how many people waited patiently to get their vanity URL on Facebook. There is a simple way (if you know how to edit your .htaccess file) to create a redirect to your page.
So, you can simply forward something like http://www.yourcompanyname.com/facebook to your Facebook page.
EA is stopping at nothing to get you aware about their brand new release – The Sims 3. They are on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. Even here in Singapore you see EA Singapore put up a Facebook Page to annouce the launch party which took place at Iluma @ Bugis on June 2.
Today, it became a trending topic on Twitter. Based on the number of followers and fans, I would say that their buzz marketing was a success. The
So, now that the game is launched, already we are seeing some pissed-off fans who can’t seem to run it on their computers. My task for you, my dear reader, is to monitor the conversations from this point forth, and see if EA is as vigilant with their pre-launch social media maketing as they are with their post-launch social media customer service.
I usually sleep in on Saturdays, but on May 16th, I had a date with startups.
It was the unConference 2009, held at the Matrix at Biopolis, Singapore. The turnout was pretty good – I would say more than 300. So it started out with a keynote by Scott Rafer, who was the CEO of myBlogLog.com, which was sold to Yahoo!, and now CEO at Lookery. He touched on how startups should be “Late” and “Boring” – sounds weird at first, but after the keynote I found truth in what he said. There are certain areas on the web that are tedious and mundane, aka boring, like aggregation, directory listings, and statistics, but these are the services that the critical mass needs, and if you are able to provide such a service, then you can find a way to monetize it and make money. Good. Also check out Scott Rafer’s 2007 blog post on GigaOm mentioning just that and more. Interesting stuff.
I gained some insights into the challenges facing Asian startups from the panel of speakers that followed – Benjamin Joffe, Dr Gang Lu, Dr Lai Kok Fung, Wong Hoong Ann, and of course, Scott Rafer. Dr Gang Lu, who is from China, provided and overview on the different ways companies in China are implementing their web ideas. Wong Hoong Ann, Founder of HungryGoWhere.com, my favorite speaker of the lot, gave a down-to-earth view on the challenges that he faced when starting his food review website, commenting on how his knees hurt because of the “countless begging” that he has to go through sometimes to get the job done. In response to a question from the audience, he also shared the experience he had with Google, when the mighty search engine took his site and filed it under 495 (whatever that means) and that caused his site to vanish from Google searches altogether. Since Google searches accounted for 50% of his site visitors, he had to comply with whatever Google wanted him to do. So this brought up a good advice from the panel – do not base your business model solely on the big guys (Google, Facebook, etc), but if so, you must have an exit strategy in case they end up screwing you over.
During lunch, I had the opportunity to meet with a few of the startups that were there. They all had interesting ideas, and it was refreshing to hear all about them. Here’s what caught my attention:
Twinity
Ok, these are guys who are going to re-model Singapore into a 3D environment, with Orchard Road and all, so what’s not to love? They are still in beta, and the desktop client is only for Windows, but they do have the city of Berlin in there, so it’s good to check them out. I’m going to follow their progress and can’t wait to see the finished product when Singapore goes 3D. Their business model is very similar to Second Life though, with a virtual currency called “Global”, and you will need to pay in order to buy an apartment within Twinity as well as everything else, like furniture, and in the future, maybe online stores might open up shop in there. [http://www.twinity.com].
eJamming Audiio
Having not met them before they did their pitch in the auditorium, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I heard musical instruments playing in the background. But when the girl on stage started singing to the music, I discovered that she was “jamming” with fellow musicians right on the site! It turns out that the cool technology behind ejamming was the near zero latency and its peer to peer live streaming. That means you can form a band anywhere in the world with just about anyone in the world. Their live demonstration was enough to make me want to go start a band. LOL. Pretty amazing stuff. Revenue comes from their subscription model, and also from the selling of hardware on their site. [http://www.ejamming.com]
Human Network Labs (HNL)
Now this is interesting. This company strives to dominate the market for short-range location tracking devices using RF technology. Their prototype chip, which they showed by sticking one on the back of a Windows Mobile Phone (who uses that?!) and the other chip to a teddy bear, and voila, the screen started showing the location of the bear in a sonar-like interface. Think along the lines of a child or pet tracking device, or maybe a way short-range tracking of your favorite coffeeshop, and if another person has that device within range, you will be able to “locate” each other. [http://www.humannetworklabs.com/]
I’d like to start a little section I call “Fresh Bits”. This is where I share with you guys my little tips and tricks on how to manage my social networks. I welcome any tips from my readers as well! Just leave a little comment on my blog. Thanks!
Ok Fresh Bit #1 – If you use gmail and you receive email notifications on from Twitter like new followers, direct messages, how do you filter through them amongst all your other mails? Simple, type in “label:inbox from:twitter” into your search box in gmail and voila! You get a list of emails sent with the From field containing “Twitter”.
If you have a website and you want to tell everyone about it, what do you do? Well, gothere.sg, Singapore’s answer to Google Maps, has deivsed a pretty clever way of using the power of social media to do just that. The plan is simple – you can do any or all three of the following: tweet, IM via GTalk, or IM via MSN.
Just the first day of launch and the Twitterverse was swarmed with twitterers professing their “love” for gothere.sg, and I’m sure that if you hadn’t heard of them before, you sure as hell would know them now that is, if you are on Twitter.
With all other things being equal, any new visits to gothere.sg should probably be attributed to this marketing effort. The question is, has the percentage increase been worth the cost of that prize, the 16gb iPhone? I’m curious to find out how effective it has been. Anyone from gothere.sg care to share? You can DM me on Twitter (geekparrot).
Here’s what I want to do – for those of you who don’t have a clue on how to get started on using social media, I’m going to give you my 6 steps list to get you started. You might already know all this, or it might be first time you are learning about this, either way, I’m sure you will get something out of it.
Let’s assume you have build your company website, and you want to add more traffic to it. Here are the first 6 steps you can take to begin your journey into the world of social media marketing.
Step One – Get a Blog
Why a blog? First, it gives you a way to update your customers or users on what you are doing as a company. Second, it is date organized, which means content always stays fresh. Third, with a blog you can increase your SEO rankings through inbound links. In writing a blog you are not only reaching out to your customers and giving them an avenue to interact with you on relatively informal (friendly) level, you are also creating a platform from which all your other social media marketing efforts can jump off from.
So how do you get a blog? Blogs have been around long enough that it is not difficult to get one. Now to get a GOOD one is another story. Through the years I’ve used MovableType, Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, Vox, Squarespace. Look for at least the following features – ease of installation, large theme resource, ability to easily edit CSS and template files, and have good widgets and plugins build for it. Most are free, but some are paid, or have premium services. If you do not have an IT team in your company to support your blog save yourself the pain of constant updating and go with the hosted blogs like Wordpress.com, Blogger, Typepad, and Squarespace.
Step Two – Make Your Blog Known
If you have registered for a blog on one of the hosted blog service providers, congratulations, you would have already inherited a group of bloggers who will most likely “stumble upon” your blog. If your blog is self hosted, you have a little more work to do. First, identify a list of online blog directories you can submit your blog to. Here are a few, but please do some research on more niche directories depending on your business type:
Another element to making your blog known has to do with the word ping. After you write a blog article, a pinging service will automatically inform all blog search services that you have updated your blog. Sign up for a few services like Pingoat, Pingvine, and SEO Zoo has a list of Ping URLs to include if you would like to do it manually as well.
Step 3 – Work on RSS RSS is important because people don’t want to have to visit your site everytime they want to read about you. So you need to make your blog easily subscribable through RSS. I’ve used Feedburner and I highly recommend them. If your blog already has a URL to your RSS feed, why do you need a feed aggregator web app like Feedburner? This is more for ability for tracking as well as portability. Feedburner provides additional statistical information that your RSS feed doesn’t provide, and for portability – say you want to switch blog providers, from Blogger to Wordpress. You don’t have to re-publicize your feed if you use Feedburner – the world knows your RSS feed as http://feeds.feedbuner.com/yourcompanyname, and all you need to do is to update the blog RSS it points to. That way you don’t lose your readership.
Step 4 – Get a Twitter Account
If you already have a personal Twitter account, try to keep it separate from your company’s and start a new one. Although, having said that there is no harm is combining your personal and business accounts as one. Then do a Twitter search, TweetDeck or Yahoo! Sideline to locate your target audience on twitter. Follow them to gain exposure. Whether or not they follow you back is beyond your control, but if you have good content and they are interested, they will follow. Once you have a pool of followers, it is easy to market your products or services to them through Twitter. Make sure you learn about the usage of “@” and “#” on Twitter, and use them well.
Step 5 – Get on Facebook
In the past Facebook was closed, and you could only interact with people within your network. With the rising popularity of Twitter, Facebook now has also become more open. The re-vamp of Facebook Pages provides companies another engine to market their website. Create a Facebook Page for your company website, and invite your friends to become fans. Whenever you post an update on your Facebook page, it automatically gets added to your fans’ news feed, and as a result they will be informed on your company’s activities, new launches or offerings.
Step 6 – Blog + Twitter + Facebook
So you now have a blog, a twitter account, and Facebook account – make them work for you!
1. Use a Twitter widget to embed your Tweets on your blog.
2. Use an automatic tweet generator like Twitterfeed or Pingvine to post a tweet whenever you update your blog.
3. Make sure that when you update your Twitter feed your Facebook status gets updated as well. That way, not double work. The latest version of Tweetdeck does that, or you can use the Twitter Application found on Facebook.
4. Add your company website URL on your profiles on Twitter and Facebook. Always include them when you have the chance.
What I’ve told you above is just the beginning. There are so many ways you can leverage the tools out there. Be creative, take a look at how Threadless, Zappos do it. The main thing is to keep things fresh, current and frequent, so you don’t fall off the radar, build relationships using your tweets and Facebook friends and fans.
If you have other tips for social media newbies to learn from on how to get started building online relationships and traffic, please add a comment on this blog post.
So I have a theory. I’ll start off with a question for you – What are the success factors that go into a creation of a great social media website? One of the difficult questions facing social media today is how the hell do you measure it? Is it by your member count? Are the members doing what you want them to do on your site? What makes them come back, and how do you make sure they do, because a social site without a community and interactions, is, sort of not one at all, right?
I’ve been talking to friends and family, yes, they are my test subjects – what better way to get good feedback than to ask the participants themselves? From the answers I have gathered, I have devised a framework that I think might be useful for anyone who is thinking of starting a social site.
I call it the FRESHAnalysis. Yes – another acronym for the masses. Enjoy. FRESH stands for Friendliness, Relevance, Engagement, Simplicity, and Handiness. You see, with a framework like this, only then can you focus on creating metrics and analytics to measure their success. With me so far?
Let’s go into deeper detail:
Friendliness Jakob Nielson comes to mind. He is like the father of website usability. When I first got into the web business, I knew about him. I read his articles on how bad Flash was, how you should have clear navigation, how users are trained to see the blue color as links etc etc. all good stuff. So what do I mean by friendliness? It’s exactly that – How friendly is your site to the masses? Is it easy to navigate? How do you structure your content? Social Media is all about interaction, so unlike the old style website, where you simply write boring statements describing your product, or service, you need to make sure your social media site “interacts” with the visitor. Don’t just make statements, ask questions. Flickr has the famous “Hello” in different languages; Twitter has “What are you doing?”; Facebook recently just got friendlier with “What’s on your mind?”. Making people feel comfortable on your site does go a long way in gaining popularity and return visits.
Relevance
This one’s a bit tricky. One would assume that when you build a social media site, you are targeting a global audience. If you do that, you might end up targeting no one. See how MySpace has evolved to target the teens and musicians, and Facebook is for the more mature crowd? Don’t forget that geography plays a big role in Relevance too. Something that is hot in the US doesn’t mean it will be hot everywhere else. Many of my friends don’t “get” Twitter because they are conservative, private individuals who don’t see the point in “tweeting” where you are, or what you are doing. Companies need to understand that cultural differences do exist, and develop strategies to provide relevant features for their targeted segment.
Engagement
How much time are people spending on your site? As a social media site, it makes sense to keep your visitor on your site for as long as possible, and making sure that person comes back as often as possible. In this day and age, there are many ways to be “on your site” – email alerts, subscriptions via RSS, games, photo uploads, video uploads just to name a few. With this goal in mind, it is your job as a marketer to decide what relevant features and activities to provide based on your target audience’s preferences and tastes. Remember the games you played on Facebook and the time you wasted? Facebook owns you.
Simplicity
You must have heard the phrase “Simplify, Simplify, Simplify”. Easier said than done, right? If you don’t understand what a site does, will you be open to what it has to offer? The answer is no. So in order to attract visitors to use your services, please simplify your messaging and make sure your site reflects that.
Handiness
In an online world of web widgets and open APIs, don’t just give your users one way to access your services, give them many options. Create a mobile version, leverage RSS, build widgets, leverage existing platforms like Facebook Connect, Yahoo! OpenID, get a Twitter feed – the key is to reach as many people as possible and make your service handy, accessible anywhere and anyway.
There you have it, the FRESH Analysis – The Framework for Evaluating Social Media Success. One of the limitations of this theory is it doesn’t take into consideration ROI and revenue generation capabilities. I believe that is another story for another time. As I develop this theory further I will propose measurements and metrics for this. In the meantime, here’s my challenge to you – How FRESH is your site?
Are you tired of hearing bout twitter yet? Chances are, if you were one of the early adopters, you probably are. But if you are a celebrity, companies, or someone from outside of Silicon Valley, you might just now got on the bandwagon. If you don’t know what Twitter is, now is the time to.
First, a little history on how Twitter came to be. Om Malik wrote a blog post about how it all started so you should take a moment to read it. It was a classic case of a simple idea being implemented at the right place at the right time and given the right opportunity, which flourished into a web phenomenon.
I’m pretty sure that what made Twitter take off was its simplicity. You go to twitter.com, type in your email and desired username, and there – you have your very own twitter feed, and can start “tweeting” and following in just a few minutes. So how can you make Twitter work for you?
For Individuals Get yourself and account on Twitter and start tweeting. Use Twitter Search as a tool to find out what the latest buzz is. Think of it as Yahoo! Answers meets Forums. Not only you tell the mass Twitterfolk what you are doing, thinking or eating, you are also tapping from them information, news, reviews, and opinions. Using Twitter’s recently improved search capability, you can track topics that you are interested in, like “Wii”, “Audi”, and “Shopping”. With the introduction of hashtags, you can filter your tweets based on your interests. If you blog, use one of the many Twitter apps out there like Twitterfeed will let you automatically post a Tweet when you update your blog. Let’s not forget all the “friends” you will be making. Granted, you don’t know them, but chances are, the more your tweet the more people with similar interests will “discover” you and start following you. Who knows, you might become a little bit of a Twitter Celebrity!
For Marketers The popularity of Twitter warrants the need for marketers not to underestimate its power. Treat it as an additional OOMPH you can leverage to enhance your marketing game plan. What does Twitter have that email marketing, your website, banner ads, SEM don’t? Eyeballs. At any time of the day, people from all over the world, from every geographical location you can think of, they are there, being fed the 140 characters of text, auto refreshing every minute. A smart strategy that leverages this will most definitely yield positive results. Starbucks has used Twitter to conduct mini contests for their followers. MacHeist has used it to announce their macware bundles. The challenge is – what brilliant idea can you think of for your next project?
For the Enterprise If you think Twitter is child’s play, and not feasible for enterprises, please take a moment to visit Starbucks, Zappos, Comcast, Threadless, CNN and view their Twitter feeds. They are just a small selection of the many companies now just starting to jump on the Twitter bandwagon. Either for marketing, customer service, or news, if you are looking for a better way to reach out to your user base or gain prospective customers, and even disseminate information to a wide audience, consider Twitter.
Moving forward Yes, Twitter still doesn’t have a revenue generating model, based on functionality, it can’t compete with Facebook and other more mature social networks, and it is still pretty basic in its features, but take a look at the numbers – tremendous growth. Why? simplicity, flexibility and portability. It takes seconds to get yourself and account, and you can update and access your tweets from almost any medium, SMS, IM, web. What’s left is for you to figure out how you can use it to your advantage.
that is, if you are on Twitter.
